Hello everyone,
I guess it's about time I've introduced myself. I've been lurking around these forums for about three weeks now. I searched for a long time for a place where people were discussing music and keyboards. This is definitely the best forum I've found with the friendliest and most knowledgable people.
My name is Mason. I grew up on a dairy farm in Leitchfield, KY, in Grayson County. Yes, it's the middle of nowhere. It's near Mammoth Cave if any of you know where that is. Anyway, my father loved music and always had music playing in the house. He bought a tiny keyboard (can't remember what it was) when I was about five or six. Before long I was picking out melodies.
I began taking classical piano lessons at age seven. This was a good and a bad thing. The good thing is that I became very good at classical music and studied it all through college. The bad news is that my teachers knew nothing else in regards to improvisation, playing "by ear," or even simply running chords together. So the first few years of my music education were very narrow.
However, DESPITE years of lessons I finally learned to play when I was about 15. I was sick and tired of not being able to sit down and play the music that was in my head, so a friend of mine showed me the nashville number system and a pentatonic scale and it was all over. I was hooked.
I began taking jazz lessons when I was 16 and I studied jazz all through college. I also played pop/rock/gospel styles in church and with a traveling music ministry. I'm now 23 and residing in Pittsburgh where I'm pursuing a full time music career.
I have mostly been a piano player, but in the last 6 months I've tried to round out my synth knowledge a bit. I've owned synths but never really understood them, and until a couple of months ago the drawbars on an organ were meaningless to me, although I had played synth organ patches for years. This forum is certainly helping to round out my knowledge of keyboards great and small.
You'll be seeing a lot of me around here,
Thanks!
Mason
